Navigating Complex Systems

Tag: technical debt

This is the abstract from a short paper I write for the Managing Technical Debt workshop at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013) in San Francisco. A preprint of the paper is available here.

Abstract

Understanding the impact of technical debt is critical to understanding a team’s velocity. For organizations with multiple teams and products, the impact of technical debt combines non-linearly to impact the organization’s velocity. We can think of the capacity of a team as a portfolio. Not all of that capacity can be invested in new features or defect fixing, without incurring negative consequences. A portion of the team’s capacity needs to be invested in the ongoing management and reduction of technical debt. This paper describes a simple technique for visualizing, quantifying and tracking a team’s technical debt as a portion of their overall capacity investment. The knowledge and insights gained through this technique help with better capacity planning, improved forecasting, and helps to justify the business case for investing in managing and reducing technical debt.

Conclusions

This paper described a technique for considering the capacity of your team as an investment portfolio. Investing in technical debt management and reduction needs to be a part of a healthy portfolio. If neglected, a team’s Technical debt will mount over time and impact their feature velocity. Consider the different ways a team could invest its time as Real Options. Make investments in debt reduction explicit and visible, and track actual investments at regular periods. Taken to an organization level, the organization needs to be ware of the amount of technical debt it has, and the overall strategy for investing in managing and reducing that debt.